"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.

January 05, 2010

Somewhere in my carbon copied files, tucked away with my memories in
corners of the attic as a concession to the demands of the here and
now, is the letter I wrote at Christmastime in 1997 about the death of
a baby elephant. It was a moment when it
seemed as if the world was too small a place not to be shaken by the
loss of such a creature. Someone living out in the semi desert of
Damaraland had walked into camp with the news that there was a little
elephant up the dry riverbed that had lost its mother. Our Namibian
father Elias Xoagub piled us and several of his other dependents into
and old land rover and we headed East,up the Aba-Huab, among the
riparian lead wood trees and camel thorns whose thirsty roots tapped
what they could sense and the elephants smell six feet beneath the
sand.

We
found it,so newly born and newly dead that it had not yet been
scavenged. So heavy that it took four grown men to lift into the bed
of the land rover.
The baby hairs on its quilted skin were finely detailed beside those on
the back of my resting hand, as one of my color slides from that day
records.

Sometimes a young elephant mother has a difficult
birth. 22 months is a long gestation time, and even in the caring
matriarchy of a breeding herd it can happen that birth happens alone.
Perhaps she abandoned the new life that had frightened and hurt her.
Perhaps, as the authorities from the Ministry of Environment and
Tourism suspected but which seems to me now quite unlikely, it had
contracted a.disease like hoof and mouth - and indeed they later burned
the carcass lest it pose a threat to livestock. Who can divine the
patterns that bring such life to an end just as it begins? How can
this big old planet contain such enormities?

That
week there were elephants walking quietly past our bedrolls as we
slept. I found the tracks of solitary bulls not 15 feet from our
tent. An elephant's hoofprint has a signature pattern that with open
eyes even an amateur tracker can discern. Over the coming days I
learned which tracks belonged to which bull, and took another
photograph of my bare footprint next to theirs.

During that year of
living with elephants, their undeniable intelligence and the
complexities of sharing living space with such complex beings, the
breeding herds always drew my eye. I could never approach them in
safety, the way it often occurred with the old tuskers, those gentle
old men. But once I was witness to the fact of the brief life of a
baby elephant, and so I know the answer to that old chestnut about
whether the unobserved tree makes a sound as it falls. The fact of its
being, just being on this earth, is there to be felt whether audible or
not. Its being does not depend on me, though feeling does.